1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an electronic card which is capable of being connected as a second card on an edgeboard connector which carries a regular electronic edgeboard.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The connection of two electronic cards by an edgeboard connector is known to the art and it extensively used in many applications. Using this method, one electronic card, called the main board, has an edgeboard connector mounted on it, usually by soldering. The other electronic card, which is the edgeboard, has a tab (edge) with a set of parallel printed strip conductors that corresponds to the layout of the contacts of the edgeboard connector. The two card are easily connected together by simply inserting the tab of the edgeboard into the edgeboard connector. Therefore, the edgeboard connector provides an excellent mechanical and electrical interface between the two cards with the advantage of easy mating and removal.
In some applications there is a need to interface several edgeboards into one main board. The trivial prior art solution is to mount several edgeboard connectors on the main board to accommodate all the edgeboards. It is evident that once a main board is built, the number of edgeboard connectors constitutes the maximum number of possible edgeboards that can be simultaneously interfaced. In applications like computers, where more cards can be used on the main board than the existing number of edgeboard connectors, this turned out to be a major disadvantage of the prior art. In other applications, the main board has a space limitation which constitutes a limit on the number of edgeboard connectors that can be placed on the main board. Thus less edgeboards can be used.